Hitting that Quota: Recapping the Battery Ventures Sales Summit

What does it take to build and scale a winning sales organization? Last month Battery convened more than 100 sales leaders to explore this topic. Featuring panelists from Salesforce, SAP, Coupa*, Glassdoor*, AppDynamics*, EventBrite, Marketo* and others, the Battery Sales Summit brought together sales practitioners from across the Battery portfolio and beyond to share thoughts and best practices.

Among the many topics explored by the panelists, hiring was one theme that came up frequently. Speakers identified grit and curiosity as the attributes they thought often underpin success in new hires, as these traits tend to exist in “Swiss-army knife” employees that can be thrown into any situation and succeed.

Team culture and how to incentive salespeople were hot topics as well, with several panelists urging the audience to cultivate their top performers in addition to spending time and resources weeding out the bottom performers in their organizations, or working with them to improve. Panelists also discussed the need for systematizing learning and growth, rather than hoping it happens organically, and intentionally building a thoughtful onboarding process.

In addition to the panels, the summit featured a small-group breakout session at which attendees tackled tough questions with fellow sales peers. Attendees shared personal insights on managing relations with CEOs, aligning customer-success teams with sales teams, cultivating brand evangelists, and creating the ideal sales “tech stack” of software tools, among other topics.

Product development and other corporate functions are obviously important to business-focused companies, but sales organizations always need special care and attention. By participating in the summit, sales leaders were able to spend the day taking a big-picture view of the inner workings of their team’s function. It is precisely the sort of deep dive that allows a leader to take his or her team to the next level.

*No assumption should be made that the investment identified above was or will be profitable. It should also not be assumed that recommendations made in the future will be profitable or equal the performance of the company identified above. For a complete list of Battery Ventures’ investments, click here, and for additional information please see Section 1 of our Terms of Use.

Battery is a global, technology-focused investment firm pursuing the most promising companies and ideas. Founded in 1983, the firm makes venture-capital and private equity investments from offices in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, London and Israel. Follow the firm on Twitter
@BatteryVentures and find a full list of Battery's portfolio companies here.